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21 May 2010

Of banana peels and popcorn

By: Viva Kermani

About two weeks ago, I met Peo and Satoko
Ekberg.

Peo is from Sweden - a country
that is fueling ahead to be the world's first oil-free country by
2020.This is without increasing its nuclear energy capabilities.I would
call this ambition, to a point of being far fetched.,but Sweden seems to
be on its way. From 70% energy from oil in 1975, today only 30% of its
energy comes from oil.

So are the 9 million Swedes committed to this idea. Is it really
possible to break the oil dependency and still run a first world
country efficiently? From what Peo tells me, yes.

Buses run on banana peels and
kitchen waste, elevators are solar powered, taxis ferry you on coffee
wastes collected from coffee shops. The capital, Stockholm, has reduced
its household wastes by 97% - a big part of the garbage is recycled
into energy to power homes and transport. Public transport in Stockholm
now runs a 100 % on bio-energy. The list goes on.

So I asked Peo, what does the city smell like with all
this garbage in buses, taxis and cars? Oh ! Fresh pop corn.

So next time you
get a whiff of fresh pop corn, remind yourself that you may not be in a
cinema house watching “An Inconvenient Truth” but you are probably in
Sweden, on a bus, going to watch Bergman’s “Autumn Sonata”